Jewish Emancipation in Russia

Faced with state-endorsed anti-semitism, Russian Jews attempted to make their own emancipation.

"Emancipation" in the western sense--that is, a contract between citizens and a modern nation state--is a term that does not apply to Russia until the twentieth century because Russia did not become a modern nation-state until the October Revolution of 1905.
Before 1905, Russia was a feudal society wherein subjects contracted privileges from a sovereign. Within this feudal society, however, some Russian Jews attempted to expand their rights. The following article outlines the Jewish pursuit of self-styled emancipation in Russia from the late eighteenth century through 1917.

Until the Polish partitions of 1772, 1793, and 1795, when Poland, wrecked by invasions and wars, was annexed by her neighbors (Russia, Prussia, and Austria respectively) and no longer existed as an independent country, there were virtually no Jews in Russia, nor was there any formal recognition of Jewish residence. (Jews were not officially allowed to settle in "Holy Russia," however, prior to 1772, some traders resided there whom the government pretended not to notice.) With the acquisition of Belorussia, Lithuania, and the Ukraine from Poland, the Russian state inherited hundreds of thousands of Jews--making Russia home to the largest Jewish community in the world. After 1795, Russia's tsars struggled with the fundamental question of how to define the Jews legally, both as individuals and as a collective.

Tsarist policy toward the Jews alternated between acts of repression and liberation. The Russian Haskalah (or Jewish enlightenment), however, pursued a policy of integration for the Jews from the mid-1800s through 1881.

The Russian Haskalah struck a tenuous alliance with the Russian government in the name of the integration of Russia's Jews into Russian society. During the reign of Nicholas I, for example, members of the Haskalah worked with the Ministry of Education to develop a state-sponsored system of Jewish schools in Russia, the crown schools. These schools, which taught the Russian language and other secular subjects, were met with opposition from traditional Jews, the Hasidim in particular. They opposed secular education, especially the sort provided by the government, which usually came with an invitation to convert. As a result, few Jewish children attended these schools. (It should be noted that all was not education and enlightenment under Nicholas I. His Jewish conscription policies were infamous for requiring the enlistment of Jewish boys ages 12-18 for a 25-year period during which they underwent a severe program of "Russification" aimed at conversion.)

During the political, social, and cultural thaw that accompanied the reign of Nicholas' successor, Alexander II, the Russian Haskalah attempted to Russify the Jewish masses. To this end, the maskilim (advocates of and participants in the Haskalah) urged practical reforms, inducing traditional Jews to depart from their "superstitious ways" of dress, diet, and demeanor and embrace a Russian lifestyle. Yehuda Leib Gordon, one of the Russian Haskalah's great poets, wrote during this period, "Be a man abroad and a Jew at home." Russian Jewry should, according the Haskalah, adopt the values, customs, and language of the greater society.

In 1881, with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, a revolution occurred in the lives of Russian Jewry. Rumors flew in the wake of the assassination. One connected the assassination to the Jews (technically, one Jew, Hesia Helfman, was present). Another claimed that the Tsar had issued a decree instructing the people to beat and plunder the Jews for having murdered his father and exploiting the people. In April 1881, a pogrom (anti-Jewish riot) erupted in Elisavetgrad; others followed through the year, beginning in cities and spreading to towns and villages. At first, Russian officials were terrified that the pogroms were part of a general revolutionary ferment, but then officials changed their tone and placed the responsibility for the pogroms squarely on the shoulders of the Jews.

Government officials set out to narrow the scope of so-called "Jewish exploitation" by passing a set of measures designed to resettle Jews from countryside to urban areas and passing restrictions on Jewish commerce and trade. These were the infamous "May Laws," dubbed by Historian Simon Dubnow "legislative pogroms." The May Laws forbade new Jewish settlement outside of towns, prohibited Jews from buying land in the countryside, and banned Jews from trading on Christian holidays and Sundays. Additional legislation sliced Jewish university quotas in half and effectively barred Jews from entering or practicing the professions.

The pogroms and the May Laws undermined the prevailing integrationist political ideology pushed by the Haskalah. The events of 1881-1882 shook the assumption that the steady acculturation of the Jew would naturally bring about equal rights and security. A range of new philosophies, including Zionism, socialism, and emigration, emerged in Russia. The adherents of these philosophies argued that Jews could not and should not integrate as individuals into the existing society, but that they should rather act to create their own destiny either within Russia or abroad.

Dr. Leo Pinsker, a medical doctor and former adherent of the Haskalah, articulated this new call to action in his 1882 pamphlet "Auto-Emancipation." This pamphlet reasoned that Jews could no longer wait for the kind of emancipation in which rights are granted from above. They needed to pursue collective self-liberation themselves--auto-emancipation.

There were still integrationists who hoped to achieve emancipation in the western sense. But, in addition, there were diaspora nationalists who wanted to establish an autonomous Jewish state in Russia, Zionists who wanted to build a Jewish state in Palestine, and Socialists who wanted a revolution to free all citizens from the oppressive grasp of the industrialized state.

With the formation of a quasi-constitutional monarchy after the revolution of 1905, Jews had their chance at legal emancipation in the western sense. Russian Jews were elected to the Duma, where the question of emancipation was debated but not resolved before the Duma was dissolved in 1906. Formal emancipation finally came to the Jews of Russia after the dissolution of the tsarist state in 1917. That same year, the Provisional Government passed a decree abolishing all religious and national restrictions, which, in effect, granted citizenship to Russia's Jews. While this decree made Jews citizens of Russia, it did not erase the realities of public anti-semitism. Pogroms continued to erupt as civil war engulfed Russia from 1918-1921. When the Bolsheviks emerged from civil war victorious, a new chapter in Russian Jewish history commenced--the subject of which was maintaining Judaism under communism.

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